The Awakening: Learning to swim

Kate Chopin's turn-of-the century novel about a woman's emotional and sexual awakening caused outrage and then fell out of print for decades, but it was The Feminine Mystique of its day, argues Barbara Kingsolver

Adrian Pasdar and Kelly McGillis in Grand Isle, a film adaptation of The Awakening.

The Awakening was published in 1899, on the cusp of a century that has already come and gone. I sometimes appraise the relevance of a classic, and amuse myself in the process, by imagining the updates required in order to adapt this book to film for a modern audience. In the case of The Awakening, our screenwriter's first task would be to rename the pretty young heroine: maybe she'll be called Eden, or Eddye. Her name in the book, Edna, was common in its time but fell precipitously out of favour after 1941. It's hard for us now to picture an "Edna" as anything but a silver-haired matron, 80 if she's a day, stalwart bosom like a ship's prow … Let's erase that mental picture before it sinks in.

Eddye, then, is an energetic twentysomething, blond, brown-eyed, with two little boys, a husband and a captivating restlessness. In the story's opening scene, her husband Mr Pontellier rocks in a chair on the porch, perusing the stock market reports. He looks up from his newspaper barely long enough to chide his wife for going swimming in the ridiculous heat and getting sunburned. The setting of Grand Isle, a summer resort on the steamy coast of Louisiana, stands up across the decades as a perfect backdrop to a story of personal discovery and sexual intrigue. The guests relax in the deep shade of graceful old water-oaks and stroll through their long, lazy days carrying parasols, which we'll have to replace with sunscreen. Skirts will need to be shortened, and bathing costumes radically abbreviated. We will obviously have to do something about the "quadroon nurse" who is looking after the children. But beyond that, the Pontelliers' family arrangement is not unlike that of a certain class of modern city-dwellers: while the wife and boys summer away from the city, the husband spends his week working in the office, comes out to Grand Isle on the weekends with the family and gets bored so quickly he tends to duck out at dinnertime for cigars and poker with other men. Meanwhile, the Mrs has settled into a languid routine among the well-heeled resort guests.

In the midst of all this, our heroine has accidentally attracted an admirer of the opposite sex. Robert Lebrun, the resort-owner's son, has attached himself to her like a barnacle. In the opening scene they've just come back together from the beach, and sit on the porch steps laughing at their private jokes. Mr Pontellier watches his wife and Robert with a benign lack of interest. Confident of his wife's loyalty and his own place as master of his ménage, he can't conceive of Robert as a potential rival. Rather, he holds him in about the same regard one would have for a friendly stray dog that can be tolerated as long as it remains amusing.

Already any superficial distractions of period detail or class privilege evaporate because the heart of this tale is as timeless as marriage itself. The husband and wife who share a bed but inhabit different lives: these couples are still keeping marriage counsellors in business. And romantic comedies often seem to involve the man and woman who are best friends, technically platonic, leaning against one another's shoulder as they laugh, skating on a thin ice of innocence that seals underneath it an ocean of desire. From the first pages of The Awakening we are pulled into territory that feels utterly current and familiar, with an undercurrent more dangerous than romantic comedy. Mr Pontellier scrutinises his sunburned wife "as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage".

Before we meet her in the summer of her awakening, Edna has resigned herself to a certain kind of life, without knowledge that alternatives might exist: the pleasure of a companion, for example, with whom she could talk for hours without running out of things to say. The novelty of a man who actually listened to her. She has a husband who smiles and ignores her, or else scolds her for imaginary infractions, sometimes ferociously. He seems to believe this is what wives require.

In the years since they were married Mr Pontellier has come to disregard his wife but has not really abused her, he's kind enough, he provides for her and the children. She knows she ought to be satisfied, and has no reasonable explanation for the tears that overtake her, "like a mist passing across her soul's summer day".

Rare is the woman, even now, who would claim to be a total stranger to that brand of unnamed sadness. Though our expectations have shape-shifted drastically through the decades, certain constants connect every age. The keen disappointment Edna hides within her domestic tranquility is a touchstone. Sixty years after The Awakening, Betty Friedan famously called it "the problem that has no name." In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Friedan articulated the frustration of women whose lives gave them virtually no independence, creativity, or opportunity, and who were expected to feel grateful about it. Edna Pontellier's affliction was still epidemic in the 1960s, when marriage had become, if anything, even more idealised. Magazines and the advertising industry heralded dependency; having no trade or profession was presumed to be enviable. For the adult female intellect, the best-suited conversational colleagues were thought to be preschoolers. Pot roast was a sacrament. A generation of housewives, thus steeped in putative bliss, had learned to dull their misery with alcohol and tranquilisers. Women talked as they had never talked before, daring to name their frustrations and thwarted dreams. Birth control and a fair number of divorces ensued; education and employment eventually followed.

As a member of the post-war generation, I arrived belatedly to both The Feminine Mystique and The Awakening. I read them in the same year, 1973, and the two books are intrinsically linked in my mind, because in tandem they made me want to weep and rend my clothing. They gave words to the increasingly suffocating atmosphere of a life I had entered, wherein it came to pass that boys would be boys and girls were charged with keeping them under control. By that time, women could certainly look forward to careers, but we would make our way in a world that remained chary of women in leadership roles, presumably because hormones made us capricious and morally unstable. In my first job as a copywriter for my small town newspaper, at 16, I was actually taught to strike out the given name of any newsworthy female, carefully replacing every Jane Doe with "Mrs John Doe," or else "Jane, daughter of Mr John Doe". I furtively broke this rule, but it did not change my sense that female accomplishment was somehow being erased, everywhere, by forces beyond my grasp.

I was rescued, in my first year of college, by a choir of renegade women writers whose voices reached me like a rope thrown through my ire and confusion. In retrospect, I would name Betty Friedan and Kate Chopin as particular champions. I have moved my home across continents and oceans since my college dormitory days, and shed hundreds, maybe thousands, of books, but their two volumes are still on my shelves in the cheap paperback editions I was able to afford as a student. They make an intriguing pair: Friedan and Chopin could hardly have seemed more different, but their books stand as fascinating bookends on a century and a half in which women's lives and labour were commodified, manipulated and repossessed in what Friedan called "progressive dehumanisation in the comfortable concentration camp". Friedan laid out the sociology of this great hoodwink in convincing terms, but Chopin's contribution occupied a different dimension. Using the nuanced and poetic language available to her, she framed a part of female experience that had never before been acknowledged. The effect was explosive.

The relief in recognising that others have felt what we feel is surely the great unifying experience of humanity. I can appreciate the full measure of frustration in Edna Pontellier's life, even if I have managed to avoid the worst of her fate. And by reaching across centuries to touch me with its warning, The Awakening reminds me that my daughters are navigating a world that is unfortunately not very different from the one in which I grew up. When I look around at government and the captains of industry, I can't declare this world very much more welcoming to powerful and passionate women than it ever was. I am also reminded that fiction by and about men is called "literature," but this novel and others by women are regularly sent to a shelf called "women's lit," and more than a few male readers remain as uninterested in that shelf as Mr Pontellier was in his wife's conversation. It is their loss. I wish I could declare The Awakening a period piece, but Chopin's social analysis still hits its mark.

Even so, what has kept it in my bookcase through all these years is its strength as a work of literature. With astonishing efficiency the author centres the reader squarely inside a young woman's yearning brain. Among the happily amphibious vacationers taking their daily swims, Edna paddles around near the shore, troubled by her inability to swim, hiding her deficiency, mildly ashamed of her adult fear of the water. And then one night, still early in the novel, when the sea is perfect and the stars pull on her with a strange gravity, she forgets her fear. She is "like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realises its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence …" Intoxicated with her newfound skill, Edna grows reckless, overestimating her strength, swimming much farther than any of the other women ever go. "She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself."

In a few delicate paragraphs describing a woman learning to swim, all that will happen is crystallised and foreshadowed: Edna's discovery of her body, her power, her bliss as a complete and solitary human being beneath moon and stars, her embrace of an impossible horizon. She will aspire to a room of her own. She will smash a vase, just because she feels like breaking something. (And who hasn't?) She will tell her husband not to wait up. Possibly, she will earn money! What we have here is very much more than a sexual awakening.

If Chopin seems an unlikely candidate to have written the "Feminine Mystique" of her day, a closer look at her life reveals her substantial credentials. Married at 20, she moved with her husband Oscar to his home state of Louisiana and had six children in the next nine years. Meanwhile, Oscar's bad business decisions bankrupted the family and brought them down in the world, to a small parish where they managed a general store. Living among Cajun and Creole communities exposed Chopin to fascinating new worlds, but her husband's sudden death must have quashed any great sense of romance about the place. Widowed at 31, with many mouths to feed, she struggled to support herself and ultimately she was forced to moved back to St Louis to accept help from her mother, After her mother's death the following year, she began to write. Her short stories found a wide readership and substantial critical success during her short career, until The Awakening. With a larger and more mature body of work, it seems likely Chopin would have earned a more prominent place in the modern canon. But luck was never on her side; she died of a brain haemorrhage in 1904.

When The Feminine Mystique appeared in the 1960s, the world was primed and ready. Not so for The Awakening in 1899. The restless journey of Edna Pontellier knocked her author into an orbit of ugly controversy. It was one thing to undermine patriarchy in subtle terms, by portraying women as real people rather than foils for a masculine disposition. But the subject of The Awakening, quite explicitly, is female passion. The potential fire of a woman's inner life was not considered a suitable subject for readers who carried parasols. Chopin was condemned by critics, including Willa Cather. The Awakening raised its small ruckus and then fell out of print. It did not resurface in any significant way until women in the 1960s began to read and talk about it.

The remarkable magic of literary fiction is that every reading of a novel creates a unique event, for each reader brings to the reading chair his or her own luggage of lived days and unlived desires. I am not the same reader who sat down with my paperback Awakening in 1973, but I still read it in one sitting. I still marvel at Chopin's realism, her impatience with conventional trappings, her arresting honesty. I may take issue now with some of the choices Chopin gave her heroine, but that's surely because I now have more choices myself than I did back then.

Edna is dated in name only; everything else about her is alive and breathing. As I turn the first page, there she is, still vibrating with frustration and a yen to smash something, keen to break the rule that needs to be broken. Waiting to walk out into the water and awaken.

•The Awakening is reissued this month by Canongate. It will be dramatised on Radio 4 at 7.45pm every day this week and will be discussed on Woman's Hour.

• This article was amended on 19 August 2014 because an earlier version said The Awakening was going to be dramatised on Radio 4 at 2.30pm every day this week. This has been corrected to say at 7.45pm.